Cohere CEO Aidan Gomez used a Bloomberg Television interview to push back on the idea that a small circle of frontier AI labs should get to set safety rules for the entire industry. Responding directly to Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei's recent call for leading labs to deliberately slow the pace of AI development, Gomez argued that such a coordinated approach starts to look like "cartel" behavior rather than genuine safety policy. He said AI builders deserve a voice in shaping guardrails but should not be the ones deciding the rules for everyone else, warning that standards written only by a handful of commercially aligned companies would serve those companies' interests as much as the public's. Gomez called instead for a wider, more diverse set of voices in the conversation, including regulators, researchers outside the biggest labs, and the public.

The comments land amid a broader rift in Silicon Valley over how fast AI should advance and who gets to referee that pace. They stand in contrast to voices like White House AI czar David Sacks, who has argued companies can largely police their own safety practices without new government rules, as well as to Amodei's push for a deliberate slowdown. Gomez's framing reframes the debate away from a simple fast-versus-slow split and toward a question of legitimacy: whether decisions with sweeping consequences should rest with the handful of firms building the most powerful models. As Washington weighs how directly to regulate AI, the disagreement among the industry's own leaders is likely to shape how any eventual rules get written.